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Dourley's thesis can be stated briefly. The human race is imperilled by the religious nature of the psyche, which tends to assemble people in archetypally bonded groups claiming access to absolute truth. The world religions, especially the monotheisms, are prime culprits, rapidly followed by political powers that operate in totalitarian ways. The Enlightenment mind with its rationalist presuppositions is also indicted. Recruiting Huntington to support his thesis, Dourley believes that ‘In the current and future “clash of civilizations” all wars become religious wars’ (p. vii). Religion is our greatest hope and greatest danger.
Can religion be saved from religion? Yes, says Dourley, but only if enough individuals are prepared to embrace Jung's understanding of religion as a natural process, wholly contained within the psyche. From this perspective, every ‘ism’ becomes but one manifestation of an infinitely richer wholeness, contained within the self, to which we should aspire—while understanding that the final kingdom can never come. In a fine quote, which appears several times, Jung says, ‘Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself’ (p. 24).
How can we achieve this degree of individuation? By attending to the ‘revelation of the dream’ (p. 24) which, Dourley maintains, gives us ‘unmediated’ access to the unconscious. Far from encouraging ‘solipsistic individualism’, as some have charged, the individuation process ‘rests on the experience and agency of the ground of the individual psyche as the source of consciousness universally. Intercourse with such an agency breeds in and of itself a universal sentiment and a compassion as encompassing as the universality of its ground’ (p. 135), a quotation that illustrates Dourley's tendency rather to idealize religious experience.
Chapters are devoted to Buber's spat with Jung over the ontological status of God, and to Jung's arguments with Vict